Letters to Juliet
starring Amanda Seyfried, Christopher Egan, Gael Garcia Bernal, Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave
written by Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan
directed by Gary Winick
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
Amanda Seyfried plays Sophie, fact checker for The New Yorker magazine. She goes off on a “pre-honeymoon”trip to Italy with her Italian American fiancé who is preparing to open an Italian restaurant in the Big Apple. It’s funny how passionate he is about food. He cares more about food than he does about Sophie, which is why they go their different ways in Italy - he to tour vineyards and she to tour the sites - and then break up by the end of the movie. But don’t worry, it’s an amicable separation.
In Verona, the setting of Shakespeare’sRomeo and Juliet, Sophie stumbles across a group of Italian ladies - city employees - who act as Juliet’s secretaries by answering each and every note that love-sick women leave affixed to the wall of the Casa di Giulietta, the house that the city of Verona sells to tourists as the real home of Shakespeare’s
Juliet Capulet.
She stumbles upon a love note left by a British teenager for her Italian lover in 1957. Unable to resist a good love story, and because she is an aspiring writer, Sophie seeks out the author and helps her track down her Italian god fifty years after the fact. It’s ridiculous, but good love story stuff. Incidentally, the story has a very happy ending, and in the meantime we are treated to some utterly fantastic rural Italian scenery. The sunlight is so fantastic!
My favorite lines are:
“Life is the messy bits.” And,
“One of the great joys in life is having one’s hair brushed.”
I’ll have to take that on faith, because I no longer have enough hair to comb, let alone brush.